In our staff editorials, we often call on Marquette’s administration to be more open, more honest and more accountable. We at the Tribune want to live up to those same demands.

With competing sources of information, it’s no longer enough to just be a member of the media — including student media. Trust is earned, after all. We want to keep developing a relationship with you by being more open about how we operate.

We can’t invite you all into our newsroom, as much as we’d like to. But we can blog about it. Behind The Byline will throw back the curtain and show you the process we use to tell the stories of the Marquette community.

People from across the Tribune’s departments will discuss their role, the decisions they have to make and useful details for you to better judge what we produce every week. We’ll show the timeline that takes an idea and turns it into a published story. Occasionally, we’ll let you into our planning process by publishing our budget, what we call the list of planned stories for the next issue.

We hope this post isn’t the start of a monologue, but of a conversation. We don’t want you to just nod along. Instead, ask questions, suggest improvements and point out the problems you see. We are not infallible (as our correction section proves), and we want to take our readers’ diverse views and backgrounds into consideration.

We can’t promise to do everything you tell us. But we do promise to take your thoughts seriously. All we ask is that you return the favor.